Sunday, June 29, 2008

Ben: Dude, why you don't have a swiss phone number still?Me: Well, because I can't decide which one I should use.Ben: You told me that half a year ago.Isabelle: Just take one and stick to it. Take Orange.Me: Orange is a color of a political force in Ukraine. I don't want to sound political.Ben: Take Sunrise then.Me: Well the quality of Sunrise is not as good as Swisscom, plus, I don't want to sound cheap.Isabelle: Take Swisscom then.Me: Well as I told you, it depends on which provider my friends use. I will pay a fortune for calls to different networks.Isabelle: Well, you are rich. And you don't care about money.Ben: Plus, you don't have any friends anyways.Me: :-/

Friday, June 27, 2008

Can you see stars in post titles? This is my small experimental Google AppEngine project called 'FoxRecord'.

The idea is simple. You embed an image in your post specifying your page's url. FoxrRecord returns you an image and increments popularity count for that page.The popularity of your pages is fairly distributed: 20% of your most popular pages are ranked '5 stars', 20% less popular — '4 stars' and so on.There is no need for JavaScript that slows down the loading of your page and is often disabled anyways. No more ugly strings like 'Page popularity: 3%' like some WordPress plugins do.A simple request to FoxRecord gives you an image:<img src="http://foxrecord.appspot.com/rating?url=http://my.page.com/path-to-my-page/my-page.html" />results in nice fancy stars:

It can be easily embedded into Blogger templates. And WordPress templates as well. Basically, into anything — any domain, any page.

To embed the popularity meter into your blogger posts, you just need to copy/paste the following line somewhere into your post template (check the guide on how to add social bookmark links to your posts in Blogger to see how to edit your post template):<img expr:src='"http://foxrecord.appspot.com/rating?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;amp;title=" + data:post.title' />

A little bit on API (parameters to /rating page):

url — specifies the url of your page. This url will be compared by popularity to other urls from your domain and the appropriate image, specifying it's relative rank, will be returned.

title — title of your page. Optional. Specifies a title of your page. Used in 'My top content' widget.

style — style of ranking image. Currently the only one supported style is 'stars' (default)

categories — specifies categories or tags for the page. Used in 'My top content by category'

show — if this argument is 'no', the rank image will not be displayed. Useful in simply gathering statistics, without displaying it. Or, for a first couple of days/hours to gather information about your top content before displaying it.

vote — if this argument is 'no', then the ranking image will simply be displayed, but the request will not count in the page popularity rating. Useful if you have multiple rank displays in your pages (for example, in your post title and at the bottom of your post).

All the above parameters are optional, to get the simplest page popularity image you only need to specify an url. FoxRecord will do the rest.

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbersgrew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto thefire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their ownimage as promised by the sacred words, and spokeof the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it wasnaught but a follower.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The game was fun. Turkish score, then Germans score in 4 minutes. Me and Jan were making fun of Isabelle that almost the whole Switzerland supports Germany, while more than a half of Germany supports Turkey because there are more turkish in Germany than Germans.Turkish scored 4 minutes later.And then Germans have managed to score 30 seconds before the official end of the game.This game was fun. Too bad the final game will take place in Vienna, Austria and not here in Switzerland.

ISDN-BRI (Basic Rate Interface) has never gained popularity as a telephone access technology in Canada and the US and today remains a niche product. The service was seen as a solution in search of a problem, and the extensive array of options and features were difficult for most customers to understand and utilize. ISDN has long been known by several derogatory acronyms highlighting these issues, such as It Still Does Nothing, Innovations Subscribers Don't Need, and I Still Don't kNow.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Find a picture you want to be your blog icon. This can be any image — and any size. Two notes: putting big images is a bad idea because it will load slower, and still will only be represented with 16x16 icon; it is better to use square images, as the image will be zoomed to 16x16. You can also use animated GIF images like I do. A great amount of favicons can be found in this great favicon collection.

Host the image somewhere. I use imageshack. Write down direct image url.

Open your blogger template (Dashboard->Layout->Edit HTML). Find the line <head>(it should be somewhere at the top), and insert the following code after it:<link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="http://example.com/path/image.gif">Replace http://example.com/path/image.gif in the example above with the path to your favicon, and image/gif with the appropriate icon file type - image/png for *.png, image/jpeg for *.jpeg, img/x-icon for *.ico. Make sure you write the full image URI to make it compatible with most of browsers.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Releasing Control Art Restriction Systems three...two...one, approval of Situation A recognized. Commencing the Cromwell invocation. Ability restrictions lifted for limited use until the enemy has been rendered silent.

I'm not an anime fan. Actually, I hate anime, but this one was just... spectacular.

My notes:

Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingate Hellsing is SUPER HOT.

Vampire hunter Paladin Alexander Anderson is HOT.

Alucard is cool, though a bit overpowered. Damn those idiots who spelled his name Arucard in english translation. It's Ākādo in original japanese anyways.

Police Girl Seras Victoria is a whiny stupid noob.

Other characters are not worth mentioning.

The soundtrack for TV series is cool. I liked it.

OVA is more in-depth corresponds more to original manga, but I hate it when it shows some scenes in anime-style (a character alone on a colored background with flowers, spirals and shit, these deformed mouths... It looks incredibly stupid).

Notes to specific TV episodes:

Episode 1 The Undead — the priest looks very much like a cleric from Equilibrium. Doesn't he? :)

Tales of the Past is a full-length series of movies based on World of Warcraft game. The series have been referred as The best World of Warcraft video. Tales of the Past III is a hour and a half length movie, featuring everything you can expect from an animated movie — nice graphics and video effects (the movie is a capture from original World of Warcraft gameplay), voice acting, action, massive battle scenes and... a nice plot. The director of this movie, Martin Falch, has even allowed me to play Orgrimm Doomhammer in the third and final part of the movie :)

The movie has been out for a while, yet I still watch some scenes from it. And I totally like this song and this episode:

The song is Starsailor — Way to Fall. For some reason, it sounds in this episode even better, then the original version (maybe because of volume highlighting).

The original movie is available for download at warcraftmovies.com (I would recommend torrent download). If you haven't seen the movie yet — highly recommended.

I've been using ZMud for quite a while. Now that I've moved to Linux (currently Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron) as my primary and the only operating system, I've found myself in need of a good MUD client. Zmud runs out-of-the box on Wine, though it runs quite slow (especially settings windows) and stub-buggy (like RichEdit input box doesn't show the text you've inputted Update: to fix it, turn off spellchecker). It also likes to crash sometimes (that can be deadly).

So I've went on a path of finding a suitable Linux Mud client for me. My main criteries were:

TinTin compatibility (given a fact I have plenty of scripts written already in ZMud, I would like to be able to export most of them, or at least port them with minimal effort)

Ability to import scripts from other mud clients (would save me a lot of work if something could import ZMud scripts)

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh no," I said, "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but decided to go home instead.

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.

I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I'd just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.

When I found the skull in the woods, the first thing I did was call the police. But then I got curious about it. I picked it up, and started wondering who this person was, and why he had deer horns.

I remember how my great-uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint.

Markov chains bullshit generator can generate the same bullshit as your PR departments. Need a speech or press release? Just use it. It also provides you with nice diagrams and positive attitude pictures.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The shittiest comic I've ever seen: Nowhere girl.I can't believe I've spent my time reading all 43 boring pages of first episode, hoping she will finally kill herself as she promised on the second page.NO SHE DIDN'T.

No way I'm even looking into the second episode.

Seven reasons why this comic sucks:

The main protagonist girl is ugly

You can't distinquish the main protagonist girl from the other girl in this comic.

Positioned like a comic about a gothic depressed chick, in fact it's a comic about a depressed introverted retarded girl full of shit.

50% of the words in this comic is: like,: He's like, cool. He does cool things, i mean, they're nerdy things, but they're like, really complicated and involved.

The website for the comic sucks, especially "combobox navigation" — isn't directly related to the "why comic sucks", but just adds to the picture.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Violence in this movie is shown with korean thoroughness. It does leave an impression on those who have already got used to "hollywood" violence.

Strangely, this movie has quite a high rating on IMDB — currently 7.8.

I won't say it's a good movie. Even more. You are really unlikely to watch it anyways, so I've written a plot here so you can have just an idea, what is "korean movie".

Plot for "Sympathy for Mr Vengeance".

A young deaf and dumb broker Ryu lives with his sister that desperately needs a kidney transplant. Loving his sister so much, Ryu decides to donate his kidney, but figures out he has a different blood type so his kidney can't be used for his sister.

Being not a very good worker, Ryu gets fired.

Desperate, Ryu contacts black market dealers. They agree to provide him with a kidney of apropriate blood type in exchange for his kidney and 10 million won (about $10.000). Ryu agrees, but finds himself fooled — he wakes up naked, without a kidney, money, and no trace of black market dealers can be found. Ryu doesn't tell the sister about the incident and his lost kidney.

A doctor tells Ryu that a donor for his sister has been found, and now they only need to pay for the operation. Operation is worth 10 million won.

To get these money Ryu and his sister decide to kidnap a child for a ransom. Initially, they were going to kidnap a child of Ryu's former boss, but after seeing a scene of engineer Peng — another worker of Ilshin Electronics who got fired — performing sepukku in front of the boss, they change their mind — if they kidnap a child of his ex-employer, Ryu will surely be one of the suspects. So they kidnap a daughter of another Ilshin Electronics CEO, not directly connected with Ryu.

The action starts here.

While Ryu is out to get the ransom, his sister finds a note in his pocket and figures out that he has lost his kidney for her. She cuts her wrists in bathroom. While Ryu goes to bury her at the riverbank, the kidnapped kid gets out of their car and drowns in the river. The kid's father, Park Dong-jin, gives money to a police officer to track the kidnappers. Together they go to a home of the guy who performed sepukku and find almost his all family dead to food poisoning — there is only one survivor — a small boy. They take him to a hospital. Ryu uses his girlfriend to track down the black market kidney dealers that fooled him and kills them with a screwdriver and baseball bat, receiving an abdomen wound by a scalpel. Meanwhile, Park Dong-jin finds Ryu's appartment and electrocutes Ryu's girlfriend to death. She mentions that she is a part of a terrorist organization. Ryu discovers her body together with police. Park Dong-jin receives a call from the hospital, stating that the boy that they have recovered from Peng's house, died. Ryu goes to his hidden hideout, where Park Dong-jin already awaits him. He shocks Ryu with electricity and takes him to the riverside, where he pronounces a phrase I know you're a good guy... but you know why I have to kill you..., and cuts Ryu's ankles underwater. Park Dong-jin goes to bury plastic bags with severed remains of Ryu and gets stalked by terrorist friends of Ruy's dead girlfriend. They stab him with knives to death. The End.

Darkplaces is a crossplatform Quake modification, allowing Quake to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and basically on anything that can display graphics because it is based on SDL and source code for it is available.It is simply great. Just from the original description from author:

The realism of shell casings falling to the floor, much improved bullet impacts, 32bit color alpha blended explosions, blood flying everywhere and sticking to the walls...

Things that I liked in Darkplaces:

Well-drawn explosions. No more coloured squares on the screen. You should see that.

Lighting. Makes Quake maps even more gloomy.

Shadows. Your own shadow can sometimes make you shit yourself.

Any imaginable screen resolution — up to something to be displayed on TV.

The website of the game speaks for itself. Just a couple some screenshots from the screenshots page:

Don't worry — all this beauty is optional, you can still play Quake with it's original look if you want.

This is simply great. Instead of going to sleep yesterday at 2am I was enjoying the new look of Quake.I won't say any more. Just go to Darkplaces Website and download it.

Extra notes:

You will still need original Quake maps and texture files found in /id1 directory of original Quake distribution (pak0.pak and pak1.pak).

Save files from the old Quake are not interoperatible with Darkplaces. Yet, given the speed that it runs, yesterday I completed the whole first Quake episode in Darkplaces for the time that it took me to complete one in Quake under DosBox.

# autofire -- continuously fires as long as you keep the button pressed.

# swap34 -- swap the 3rd and the 4th axis. can be useful for certain joysticks.

# buttonwrap -- enable button wrapping at the number of emulated buttons.

joysticktype=auto

timed=true

autofire=false

swap34=false

buttonwrap=true

[serial]

# serial1-4 -- set type of device connected to com port.

# Can be disabled, dummy, modem, nullmodem, directserial.

# Additional parameters must be in the same line in the form of

# parameter:value. Parameter for all types is irq.

# for directserial: realport (required), rxdelay (optional).

# for modem: listenport (optional).

# for nullmodem: server, rxdelay, txdelay, telnet, usedtr,

# transparent, port, inhsocket (all optional).

# Example: serial1=modem listenport:5000

serial1=dummy

serial2=dummy

serial3=disabled

serial4=disabled

[dos]

# xms -- Enable XMS support.

# ems -- Enable EMS support.

# umb -- Enable UMB support.

# keyboardlayout -- Language code of the keyboard layout (or none).

xms=true

ems=true

umb=true

keyboardlayout=none

[ipx]

# ipx -- Enable ipx over UDP/IP emulation.

ipx=false

[autoexec]

# Lines in this section will be run at startup.

mount c .

c:

quake.exe -nocdaudio

Enjoy :)

Final note: Quake will run with sound under DosBox in Linux. The problem arises when you increase resolution — it starts to lag. Even frameskip doesn't influence this much. I would recommend using darkplaces — this is a crossplatform modification of Quake, featuring native 3D acceleration, sound, optional lighting, shadow and explosion effect, numerous mods and extensions, and with all this it runs way faster then the DosBox Quake emulation.

(If you came here looking for GemCraft by ArmorGames article, just follow the link. Google has some problems with precision lately.)

Ok, back to Sonny.

Sonny game by ArmorGames is a good example of a nice flash game. Features interesting and active gameplay, nice music and is quite fast to complete. I am really eager to see a sequel - Sonny 2 :)

The game has 4 classes: Destroyer, Guardian, Assassin and Gunslinger (analogues of standard Warrior, Paladin, Rogue and Mage). There is one extra class, available through a companion but not accessible for players: Combat Medic (Healer).

The zombie idea is fun and nice. (I love Dungeon Keeper, Vampire: The Masquerade and other "opposite side" games).

The Sonny game is quite simple, straightforward and entertaining. There is no need to write a guide, FAQ or manual for it's first two episodes - just hack them all :) (oh, and you can hack bosses of these episodes again once you've completed it - you can farm them for a specific item set for example ;)

Hints about the third episode:

If you are constantly getting owned by rock golems, you can buy a resistance set from a shop. This will make it way easier. Alternatively, you can simply participate in training fights more. They give you experience, money and equipment, and eventually you'll be able to beat any amount of pesky rock golems. Remember to stun them with Break, Shatter Bolt or simply dispel them with Electro Bolt when they buff themselves with Enrage buff.

You can farm Gallant the Paladin for his paladin set. Just go again to Gadi'Kala (the Great Plains) and press Next Battle again. His set is wearable by anyone and provides you with very nice stats, combined with maximum poison piercing - your Veradux friend will start critting for 600+ damage with his Poison spell.

How to beat Baron

How to beat Gallant the Paladin

Abilities required to beat him:Subversion(optional)

To beat Gallant the Paladin nothing special is required. He likes to heal himself for ~2k from time to time, so you can invest into Subversion spell to get him killed easily — once you feel he's gonna heal himself, put Subversion on him and he will kill himself with his heal. Though this is not mandatory - you can simply whack him until he gets out of Focus points to cast heals.

Remember, you can kill him multiple times — for experience, money and Paladin set. And with an extra party member that you will receive after killing him for the first time, he should be easy for all subsequent kills.

After you have completed these three episodes which make the game, you can optionally play a "bonus" episode. The bonus episode contains 4 bosses, shops with the best equipment in the game and unlimited training fights that scale with your level.

The boss fights are a little-bit tricky and interesting. You will probably need to respec couple of times for them. The bosses there include Ignition, Omen, Doctor Herregods and Sinjid's Shadow.

How to beat Ignition

Ignition is first boss in "expansion pack", after you completed the game. He uses only 3 abilities (which make a deadly combination though):

Ignite. A spell that hits with fire damage and causes fire damage over 9 turns. Stackable - you can have many of them. Damage is low, the spell is here only to protect his next ability:

Fate. The character that has Fate is going to die after next turn if not dispelled. That's why Ignite is so dangerous - spells with longer duration are removed first, so if you have both Ignite and Fate, Ignite gets dispelled first and the character dies from Fate.

Dark Healing. Heals Ignition for 1000hp every turn for 9 turns.

Fate is very dangerous. You can't rely on any of your dumb companions to dispel it. You will need to invest at least 2 points to get Heroic Motivation. You can either put 4 Heroic Motivation spells into your quickslot so you are able to dispel every turn or chain-stun him with Break and Shatter Bolt every time he uses Ignite (so he won't cast Fate) until your Heroic Motivation is ready again. Alternatively, you can invest 3 points into Heroic Motivation and don't care about Ignite debuffs and only dispel once you have a Fate spell or 3 Ignites.

The best choice - 4 tier 1 Heroic Motivation spells in your action bar - you save 2 ability points because you don't invest into tier 3 spell, and you can't miss with a healing spells, while you can miss a stun spell.

His heal spell is dangerous. Your companions can eventually dispel it - though it's better to have Electro Bolt in your action bar as well. One rank 1 electro ball should be enough.

How to beat Omen

He has 320k hp and it would take a month to hack him down if he didn't possess a very dangerous self-buff: Dark Omen. This ability is deadly both to you and your companions and to himself. When buffed with Dark Omen, his next strike is going to be devastating, killing anyone he strikes instantly, but while he has this buff, he takes roughly 100 times more damage as well.

Strategy is simple. Get Break, Shatter Bolt and Heroic Motivation. When he buffs himself with Dark Omen, use Break or Shatter Bolt on him and let your companions whack him for 50k+ dmg. You need to guarantee that your companions will hit him when he is buffed, so heal them yourself with Heroic Motivation - this way they will always be at full health and will be greatly motivated to hit him, instead of casting some stupid focus regen stuff.

For this mission I would recommend Veradux the medic in paladin's set and Amber the Assassin. Veradux can whack for 50k+ with his poison spell while Omen is under his Dark Omen buff, and Amber can in theory one-shot him if she is under Shadow Blend and crits with Master Strike on a buffed Omen.

How to beat Doctor Herregods

He is easy.He has one million hp but he likes to heal himself for two millions. Get Subversion and beat him under 990k hp. Put subversion on him and let him heal himself and die.

Stunning him with Shatter bolt can make it easier and more controllable (remember, if you companions hit him when he is under Subversion, it will heal him and he might have no desire to heal himself for a whooping 2mil. So, have the lowest speed to ensure your Subversion lands on him in the end of the turn, when your companions have already hit him).

How to beat Sinjid's Shadow

This guy is mean. He comes with two companions and has an attack that costs 100 focus but can instantly kill anyone.

To defeat him, you will need to have a point in Subversion, a point in Block, at least three points in Regeneration and optionally Master Strike and Reform. That basically means that you can beat him on lvl 10 - though it will take you quite some time if you don't have a way to hit him hard - that's the reason I would recommend Master Strike - it is a high precision attack and it also gives you Break skill. If you have extra ability points, put them into Regeneration to get it to 5, Master Strike and optionally invest one point into Reform - for dire situations.

The combat action bar setup is the following: Supression, two Blocks, Subversion. Two of your damage skills (Master Strike recommended), and possibly Reform and Block (you can use Shatter Bolt instead of Block, from my experience Block works more often though). Put on a set from Gallant the Paladin - it gives you plenty of hp, good protection and a healthy amount of speed - Master Strike depends on speed, so the more you have the merrier. Invest your attribute points into speed as well.

The strategy:just kill him now. You will always have a Block or Subversion ready against his super-power and you will be under Supression or Block against his melee attacks for 95% of time (use Break or Shatter Bolt if you Supression isn't ready yet). If you are low on health - use Reform, though heals from his super-power when you are under Subversion should be enough. If you are lucky enough your companions won't be killed too fast and they will deliver some serious damage to him as well.

There is an alternate option - you can use Disruption to drain his Focus points. His super-power costs 100 points, so as long as you can keep him under 100 points he can't use it. Though, then he will use Shadow Blend, Master Strike and other nasty things, almost one-shotting people. And eventually you will miss Disruption, and that will mean you are one man less. Can still work if you are lucky enough - I just personally love the first way. I was able to hack him like that on lvl 17.

Cheats/Hacks/Glitches

The game is easy enough even without using cheats. But in case you need some extra help, here they are:

'Eat items' glitch:

Go to your inventory screen

Pick up the item that has some stats from your inventory (attention: the item will be destroyed. You will gain the stats though)

Click on "options" button in the bottom of the game screen

With item as your mouse cursor, click on the red background of the options screen

Friday, June 6, 2008

These deaths are not noted in Darwin awards. Yet they are well worth mentioning.Caution! reading this list can cause multiple phobias — you risk to develop phobias to laughter, food consumption or insomnia. You will be afraid to hold your bladder. Don't say I didn't warn you.

My comments are in green.

458 BC: Aeschylus, Greek playwright, was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone. The tortoise survived.

270 BC: Philitas of Cos, poet and critic reportedly wasted away and died of insomnia while brooding about the Liar paradox.

336: Arius, the heretical priest who precipitated the Council of Nicea, passed wind and evacuated his internal organs.

Martin I of Aragon died from a lethal combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing.

1599: The Burmese king Nanda Bayin reportedly "laughed to death when informed, by a visiting Italian merchant, that Venice was a free state without a king."

1601: Tycho Brahe, according to legend, died of complications resulting from a strained bladder at a banquet. It would have been extremely bad etiquette to leave the table before the meal was finished, so he stayed until he became fatally ill. This version of events has since been brought into question as other causes of death (murder by Johannes Kepler, suicide, and lead poisoning among others) have come to the fore

1660: The Scottish aristocrat Thomas Urquhart, polymath and first translator of Rabelais into English, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.

1751: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the author of L'Homme machine, a major materialist and sensualist philosopher died of over eating at a feast given in his honor. His philosophical adversaries suggested that by doing so, he had contradicted his theoretical doctrine with the effect of his practical actions.

1771: King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favorite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk. He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death."

1830: William Huskisson, statesman and financier, was crushed to death by the world's first mechanically powered passenger train (Stephenson's Rocket), at its public opening.

1865: Lord Francis Douglas died after falling 4000 feet, having completed the first summit of the Matterhorn.

1899: Felix Faure, French president, died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office. — Bill Clinton should be happy he got away only with a political scandal :)

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination. — poor Jack. Note to myself: never kick anything after drinking whiskey (especially Jack Daniel's Black Label)

1912: Franz Reichelt, tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.— Yeah, he was quite a dummy, Franz Reichelt, parachute inventor :)

1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, was poisoned while dining with a political enemy, and supposedly he was given enough poison to kill three men his size. When he did not die, one assassin sneaked up behind him and shot him in the head, and while checking Grigori's pulse he was grabbed by the neck by the mystic and was strangled. He proceeded to run away, while the other assassins chased. They caught up to him after he was finally felled by three shots during the chase. The pursuers bludgeoned him, then threw him into a frozen river. When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be drowning. There is now some doubt about the credibility of this account, though.Doctor: I don't know what did you guys do to him, but he will live.

1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon became the first to die from the alleged King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face became seriously infected.

1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and broken neck when one of the long scarves she was known for caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

1932: Eben Byers, died of radiation poisoning after having consumed large quantities of a popular patent medicine containing radium.

1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air. I will never again slap stewardesses on their asses!

1945: Scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a sphere of plutonium while working on the Manhattan Project. This caused the plutonium to come to criticality; Daghlian died of radiation poisoning, becoming the first person to die in a criticality accident.

1946: Louis Slotin, chemist and physicist, died of radiation poisoning after being exposed to lethal amounts of ionized radiation. He died in a very similar way as Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., from dropping a block of material on the same sphere of plutonium by accident. The sphere of plutonium was nicknamed the Demon core.

1955: Margo Jones, theater director, was 43 when she was killed by the carpet in her Dallas apartment. She died July 26 from exposure to carbon tetrachloride fumes from the newly cleaned carpet.

.1972: Leslie Harvey, guitarist of Stone the Crows was electrocuted on stage by a live microphone.

1978: Claude Francois, a French pop singer, was electrocuted when he tried to change a light bulb whilst standing in his bathtub which was full of water at the time.

1978: Kurt Goedel, the Austrian/American mathematician died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Goedel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else. He was 65 pounds when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.

1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known man to be killed by a robot.

1981: Carl McCunn, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

1983: Author Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to drugs and alcohol effects.

1984: Jon-Erik Hexum, an American television actor, died after he shot himself in the head with a prop gun during a break in filming. Hexum apparently did not realize that blanks use paper or plastic wadding to seal gun powder into the shell, and that this wadding is propelled out of the barrel of the gun with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired at point-blank range.

1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."

1998: In Congo a soccer game between the home and a visiting team ended when every player on the visiting team were struck by a fork bolt of lightning; killing them all instantly, while the home team was unharmed. This was due to the visiting team having metal studs on their soccer cleats causing each member of the team to become their own living conductor of electricity.

2003: Brandon Vedas died of a drug overdose while engaged in an Internet chat, as shown on his webcam.

2003: Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist who had lived in the wilderness among bears for thirteen summers in a remote region in Alaska, was killed and partially consumed by a bear, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. The incident is described in Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man.

2005: 28-year-old South Korean, Lee Seung Seop, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing StarCraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe. —My personal record was over 32 hours of leading an exp group while making my last, 200th level in a Sloth MUD game. I survived. I did smoke breaks :)

2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Wii console in a KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.

I've removed a Twitter widget from my blogger widgets. The God damn widget is too slow — Twitter downtimes and high response times are legendary. And the stupid widget also tries to execute a JavaScript from the laggy Twitter server. You do know that browser won't do any downloads or processing of your page while it loads a script, right? With a 5 minutes wait for Twitter server to serve it's lousy JavaScript and then 10 minutes more for it to fetch your twits, you're in for quite a long wait.Is it that hard to serve your last 5 twits in a response to a simple GET request? Even if you lag like hell — send your twits tomorrow, but let the rest of the page be loaded fast.

Wtf is it? It looks like spaniards, mexicans and housewives have taken over Blog*Spot. Out of around 30 blogs I visited, 5 are spam blogs, 3 are "how hard it is to be a mother/look at my child", and the rest 22 are in spanish.

Ok 10 more. Some photographers and "my kids".Zomg one blog in chinese. After that much spanish even this one looks like fresh air.If I post links here, someone might think that it's a spam log as well. So I won't.Nevertheless, I've found a funny guy who draws funny stuff. Subscribed.Plenty of blogs have started to appear again.I simply can't believe that there are no interesting blogs. Everything you stumble with Next Blog button is about:

Mexicans

Kids

Family

Travels

Homemade photographers

Barack Obama

Some guy sharing software(most surely trojaned), supplying links to his ip.Omg a couple stands here and the guy looks like he's pregnant.World of Warcraft e-store splog.

Ok 5 more blogs and I go to sleep.Oh I will do it nice way. The 5th blog will receive a link from me.

Kids/spanish

Unreadable/not understandable mess in kitten English

One-post blog. About Seoul Incheon Airport. Love that airport. And love the feeling of hot air that strikes you when you go out of it. And the second feeling that strikes you even harder when you realize that it's not an artificial "hot room", but that this is in fact the climate here.

In this tutorial I will explain why Blogger scales your images down and how to post an image in it's original size in Blogger.

Why this happens? By using a Blogspot blog you receive an option to upload photos directly to your blog from the editing interface. The photos will be stored in your Picasa account. However, Blogger restriction for this is that it doesn't allow you to hotlink to your photos in full size - the maximum hotlink size of your image is 800x800.
Even more. By default, even if you choose "Large size" when you upload your photo, it will still return you a link to 400x400 images, and it especially hurts if you want to post some code snippets or precise pixel images.

What to do? There are some good news though. Most of the Blogger posts aren't more then 800 pixels wide (and even if they are, you should always think about how it's gonna look on a display of someone who doesn't have 1600x1200 resolution - you also have right and left columns that hog the display space, right?)To make your images/pictures/photos look fullsize in your blogger posts you need to edit the link to this picture. Once you upload an image from the editor interface, the code for the image will look like this:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bpV.blogger.com/
WWWWWWWWWWWW/XXXXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYYYY/
ZZZZZZZZZZ/s1600-h/my-sample-image.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bpV.blogger.com/
WWWWWWWWWWWW/XXXXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYYYY
/ZZZZZZZZZZ/s400/my-sample-image.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_UUUUUUUUUUUUU" /></a>Where UUUUUUUUUUU, V, WWWWWWWWWWWW, XXXXXXXXXXX, YYYYYYYYYYY and ZZZZZZZZZZ will be some mixed digits/letters.

See the text s400 that I've highlighted here in green? That's what you need to change. Change it to s800 and you are done.Update: Blogger has recently started to add width and height into the <img> tag, so now you also have to remove them. Just look for the text height="XX" and width="YY" and remove it before publishing the post.
This guide will help you to post full-sized images to your BlogSpot blog, if these images have less then 800x800 resolutions. If you need to post a bigger image — use services like imageshack. There is a great list of image hosting sites available on the Blogger templates blog. I wouldn't recommend to use Photobucket as it has some PhotoBucket image hosting issues though.
That's it. Enjoy.

Hello, my name is

Gary and I have created this place. I don't do much SEO anymore, however articles are still here for your (and mine) viewing pleasure. If you have a question or a request, e-mail me at cranked.me@gmail.com. Alternately, you can check my (nsfw) blog at alternate.me